Larry Ray (criminal)

• 1. Introduction

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  In September 2010, a 50-year-old man moved into a student apartment at Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school in Yonkers, just north of New York City. His name was Larry Ray, born Lawrence Grecco, and he had a simple reason to be there. His daughter Talia lived in the apartment, a sophomore sharing it with seven other sophomores. The college would later say it had not known he was living on campus. Within a few years, some of her friends would be draining their parents' savings at his direction. Others would be living by his rules and, in several cases, attempting suicide. Who was this man, and what had he done before he arrived? How does an adult take control of a group of young people so completely? And what finally brought it to an end in a Manhattan courtroom?

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• 2. A Restless Résumé

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  Lawrence Grecco was born on the 16th of November 1959 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and grew up between Brooklyn and New Jersey. His time in the United States Air Force lasted just 19 days and ended in a dishonorable discharge. In the 1980s he ran a bar in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, as a partner, under the names Club Malibu and JJ Rockers. By the early 1990s he had moved into commercial insurance, founding a brokerage that covered construction projects.

  That work brought him to Joseph Polito, a reputed member of the Gambino crime family. Polito owned and presided over U.S. Bridge of New York, a company based in Queens that needed insurance for a project. In the mid-1990s, Ray claimed that someone from the mob attached to that company was trying to kill him.

  He also made a claim about 1999, saying he had worked in Kosovo for a United States intelligence agency. No record shows he was ever an intelligence agent for the country. A NATO official was dismissive, remembering that Ray was around, was well connected, and may have made some calls, as many others did.

  In the late 1990s he became an FBI informant. His assignment was to report on a scheme involving Eddie Garafola, a Gambino capo. The effort failed, because Ray used the informant role to hide his own part in the scheme. His route to the FBI had run through a friend he made in 1995, a New York police detective named Bernard Kerik.

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• 3. Friends in High Places

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  Bernard Kerik and Larry Ray met in 1995 and were soon close, lifting weights together and riding motorcycles. Kerik had once served as Rudolph Giuliani's bodyguard and driver, and in 1995 he was promoted to run the investigations division of the city's Department of Correction.

  In 1997, Kerik asked Ray for a favor, and Ray delivered. After befriending Pavel Palazhchenko, the interpreter for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Ray arranged a meeting at City Hall between Gorbachev and Mayor Giuliani. A month later, Giuliani made Kerik the city's Commissioner of Correction, a post he held from 1998 to 2000.

  The friendship deepened. Ray gave $7,000 toward Kerik's wedding and reception in November 1998 and stood as his best man. Soon afterward, Kerik helped Ray land a job as security director at Interstate Industrial Corporation. The construction firm was run by Frank DiTommaso and his brother, and it faced allegations of organized crime ties. Part of Ray's task was to help it secure a license from city regulators. He held the job from December 1998 until March 2000.

  The bond ended around 2000, as Ray was indicted for racketeering. He began cooperating with prosecutors who were investigating Kerik, and that investigation ended in Kerik's conviction. Kerik served as New York's Police Commissioner from 2000 to 2001. He pleaded guilty in 2009 in federal court in Manhattan to tax fraud, false statements, and charges tied to his efforts for Interstate. In 2010 he received four years in prison and served three. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020.

  Ray also testified against DiTommaso at a 2012 perjury trial. In September 2015, DiTommaso spotted Ray in the lobby of the Hudson Hotel and beat him. Looking back in 2019, Kerik called Ray a psychotic con man who had victimized every friend he ever had.

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• 4. Courts and Custody

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  In March 2000, while Ray was living in Warren, New Jersey, a Brooklyn indictment named him in a federal racketeering and stock fraud case. Mobsters and stockbrokers had pumped up stock prices and dumped the shares, cheating investors out of $40 million between 1993 and 1996. Ray was accused of trying to pay a $100,000 bribe to a bond brokerage executive on Garafola's behalf, so that U.S. Bridge of New York could get a bond and take on large construction projects.

  He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud in 2003. On the 9th of April of that year, he was sentenced to nine months of home confinement and five years of probation. The judge accused him of manipulating the court.

  Probation did not hold him for long. In 2006, his girlfriend accused him of pinning her down and covering her nose and mouth. He was arrested, but she withdrew the complaint and the case was dismissed. Prosecutors still cited the arrest in 2007 when they argued he had violated probation. U.S. Marshals found him at a friend's apartment on East 93rd Street, with Talia present, and broke his arm while pinning him to the ground. A marshal recalled Talia screaming that it was police corruption, caused by Giuliani and Kerik.

  At home, the trouble ran deeper. Ray had married Teresa in 1988, and in 2004 she filed for divorce, alleging that he had hit her. A long custody fight followed over their daughters, Talia and Ava. A forensic examiner wrote that Ray could manipulate almost any situation, even an interview with an experienced examiner. The notes called him utterly charming, with a childlike smile, but a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.

  In 2005 he refused to hand Talia over to a maternal relative for a visit. That led to charges of interference with child custody, bail jumping, and contempt of court. He pleaded guilty in 2010, a parole violation, and served six months in Northern State Prison in New Jersey.

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• 5. The Father Figure

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  At Sarah Lawrence, Ray introduced himself as a former Marine trained in psychological operations, with a past in the Central Intelligence Agency. None of it was true. He started small, cooking dinners and ordering in food for his daughter's friends, and he played the role of a caring father figure.

  He told them tall tales. In one, he had recovered Stinger missiles from the black market. In another, he had engineered a cease-fire in Kosovo. He praised the values of the Marine Corps.

  Then came the "therapy sessions" and "sex education" with Talia's roommates, who were sophomores at the start. He presented himself as someone who could help with their psychological problems. In the process, he learned the intimate details of their private lives and their mental health struggles. Several of the students grew distant from their own parents.

  Once he had their trust, the conversations turned into interrogations lasting hours. Verbal and physical abuse came with them. Through threats and coercion, including threats with knives and a hammer, he pushed students to confess to things they had not done. These included damaging his apartment and property, and harming him and his family. His methods included sleep deprivation, sexual and psychological humiliation, violence, and threats of legal action.

  The confessions became a debt. Ray extorted $1 million from five victims, and some of them withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from their parents' savings accounts on his orders. He decided where they went, whom they spoke to, what they ate, and when they slept. By the summer of 2011, the group had left campus together.

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• 6. Apartment 5E

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  In the summer of 2011, Ray and a circle of Sarah Lawrence students moved into Apartment 5E at 300 East 93rd Street on the Upper East Side. It was a one-bedroom condo owned by his old friend Lee Chen. The group included Santos Rosario and his sisters Yalitza, a Columbia University student, and Felicia. It also included Daniel Levin, Claudia Drury, Isabella Pollok, and Talia.

  Sleeping arrangements reflected his control. Ray, Talia, and Isabella shared the bedroom's bed. Everyone else slept on inflatable mattresses or couches.

  Felicia Rosario was a graduate of Harvard University and Columbia Medical School. Ray persuaded her to quit a forensic psychiatry residency in Los Angeles and join the apartment. It is one of the starkest measures of how far his influence reached.

  The young women in the apartment were forced to have sex with Ray and with others. He told them it would help them move past childhood traumas. He videotaped the encounters and threatened to post the recordings and mail them to the women's parents.

  Lee Chen wanted his apartment back, but getting it took far longer than anyone could have expected. It took him six years to evict Ray.

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• 7. Labor and Trafficking

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  Four of Ray's victims graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 2013. That same year, Ray took Yalitza and Felicia Rosario to his stepfather's property in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Claudia Drury and Isabella Pollok joined them later. There he kept the refrigerator locked, scolded them for infractions that never happened, and accused them of poisoning him. The women worked without pay on the property, told they were repaying money they owed him.

  The next year, 2014, he coerced Drury, a former student, into working at a sex club. From 2014 to 2018 he forced her into prostitution and took hundreds of thousands of dollars of her earnings. She worked under a name made by combining the names of his two daughters. He was violent toward her, and once nearly suffocated her in a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

  The human cost was severe. By 2014, Santos, Isabella, Yalitza, and Claudia had each attempted suicide. Iban Goicoechea, who also lived with Ray, died by suicide.

  Isabella Pollok was 19 when she came under Ray's influence. She cut off her family and followed him along the Eastern Seaboard for ten years. In 2016, Ray, Felicia Rosario, and Pollok moved into the New Jersey home of one of his friends.

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• 8. The Reckoning

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  New York magazine broke the story in April 2019. In that article, Talia and two other former students denied the allegations against Ray.

  Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged him in February 2020, after his arrest in New Jersey. The charges included sex trafficking, extortion, forced labor, conspiracy, and money laundering, covering about eight years of abuse of Sarah Lawrence students and former students. At his bail hearing, the lead prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, told the court he had been arrested in bed with one of his victims. Bail was denied. His defense lawyers pointed to diagnoses of narcissistic personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder.

  The trial ran for nearly a month in 2022 in the Southern District of New York, on 15 counts. Several survivors testified, among them Claudia Drury. The jury deliberated for four hours and convicted Ray on every count on the 6th of April 2022.

  On the 20th of January 2023, Judge Lewis Liman sentenced him to 60 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release. The judge summed up the case in six words: "It was sadism, pure and simple." As of February 2024, Ray was held at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. His scheduled release date is the 29th of March 2071, when he would be 111 years old.

  Isabella Pollok was charged as a co-conspirator in 2021. In 2022 she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. On the 22nd of February 2023, she received a sentence of 4.5 years. The Bureau of Prisons lists her release as the 21st of July 2025.

  Hulu released the docuseries Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence in 2023. The same year, the two-act play Runts, by Melvin Jules Bukiet and loosely based on the events, opened in May at the Teatro Latea on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Wondery Law&Crime podcast "Devil in the Dorm" has also covered the cult.

  The most recent retelling came in 2024, when Lifetime aired the television movie Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story, with Billy Zane in the role of Ray.

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